On Monday, President Joe Biden announced the launch of a national database to help tackle law enforcement misconduct in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
“As part of my Administration’s executive order on policing, we committed to create a first of its kind database to track records of law enforcement misconduct so that agencies are able to hire the best personnel. Today, I am fulfilling that promise by launching the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
Biden continued, “This database will ensure that records of serious misconduct by federal law enforcement officers are readily available to agencies considering hiring those officers. We are also working to allow and encourage state, Tribal, local, and territorial law enforcement agencies to make available and access similar records as part of their hiring processes.”
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD) will include records of misconduct incidents for federal law enforcement officers, past and present, dating back seven years.
Statement from President Joe Biden on the Launch of the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database | The White House https://t.co/KCvhsCdGDJ
— Monique Pressley (@MoniquePressley) December 18, 2023
According to a Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project report, an estimated 250,000 civilian injuries are caused by law enforcement officers annually. CDC data found that Black African Americans are more than twice as likely to be killed and almost 5-times more likely to suffer an injury requiring medical care at a hospital compared to white non-Hispanics.
Biden first announced the database in a May 2022 executive order on the two-year anniversary of the murder of Floyd’s by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Chauvin killed Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by kneeling on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
“The executive order is a measure of what we can do together to heal the very soul of this nation; to address the profound fear and trauma that particularly Black Americans have experienced for generations; and to channel that private pain and public outrage into progress on behalf of all communities,” said Biden.
